can like this, the temperatures are climbing, and alger as an tune is almost 10 degrees above where you should be for this time of the year. and as we dipped toward southern africa and right now, ok, a few showers around and bob way. so bit of a damp day in harry with the high of 25 degrees, ok gutter, unceasing. ah, the african countries have struggled to reclaim many of the artifacts taken by european colonizers. and this is our experience of identity. in the final part of the series, museums and collectors still hold precious assets like the bin rooms. few have been returned, but the still a long way to go and progress is painfully slow. restitution africa stolen with pottery ation on orders here. a major league of top secret us

intelligence files, they reveal ukrainian military preparations and the pentagon thinking across a range of sensitive international issues. so how serious is this bridge for the united states and its allies, and what impact might it have on them and on russia? this is inside story. ah. hello and welcome to the program, i'm tom mccrae. the pentagon is dealing with the fallout from the worst lay could us national security intelligence and many years. initial media report, city involved classified us and nato plans to help you crime in the war against russia. but more information has since come out with files relating to china, south korea, the middle east and africa. the scale of the lake is increasing suspicion. it came

from an american source rather than from an ally. russia has been accused of doctoring some files to create misinformation, and ukrainian and south korean officials have rejected some of what's being reported as false. the pentagon says a hans been launched for the source. we'll be discussing the implications of all of this. with 3 former intelligence agents shortly. but 1st, this report from fenton monahan on the background to this lake. an embarrassing security breach, the contents of classified united states defense documents revealing news outlets across the country. the leak include insider analysis on the state of the brain war with assessment performance. both ukrainian ad russia worth officials say they don't have the source, but suspects it may have been a high level what these photos appear to show documents similar in format to those used to provide daily updates to our senior leaders on ukraine and russia related

operations. as well as other intelligence updates, some of these images appear to have been altered. the leak also revealed the existence of us buying operations on allied countries like south korea and israel. and embarrassing revelation that sparked rebukes from abroad to which we strongly regret that the top us intelligence agency has been illegally spying on allies like our country. we strongly demand a thorough investigation and urge that similar incidents do not occur. us diplomats are scrambling to repair the damage u. s. officials across the inner agency are engaging with allies and partners at high levels over this, including to reassure them of our commitment to safeguarding intelligence and the fidelity of securing our partnerships. the leaks come at a sensitive time. the state of great forces has been revealed just as believe to be preparing for a major counter offensive against russia. and

u. s. diplomats are being disrupted after they spent more than a year working on building up military support for ukraine. internationally, until u. s. officials find the source of belief they can't be sure more secrets won't be revealed in the near future. bids. monahan al jazeera ah, of a more on this i'm joined by our guests in boston, is grand cow, korea, c i, officer and former deputy national intelligence officer for trans national threats in brussels as any machine. former m, i. 5 officer, an author of the privacy mission, and in kansas colon wallace, psychological warfare specialist and form a member of british army intelligence in northern ireland. a welcome to will if you thank you very much for being on inside story said i, glen, if i can start with you as a pharmacy, i office a how embarrassing is this for you? it us intelligence agencies where it's more than embarrassing it. so the term in

the cia for when an operation goes wrong, is a flat, and this is a flap of a major magnitude. it will cause, i'm sure it already already has caused significant harm. and i expect that some people may well die from it. what do you mean by that? who will die from this? well, the reports don't say that the individual x is working for the united states. but it does say we have information of a certain nature on a given topic. and any counterintelligence service will be hastily and thoroughly now working out who has access to that information in their country and reducing the number of possible individuals. and it's quite possible that they

could identify the sources. and depending on the country that will be damaged or destroyed their career or get them killed. are you talking about russia specifically here? yes, yes. so because of this lake, you think some of the russian sources that have potentially been fading information to us intelligence services. the consequences they faced potentially include being killed i think that's very possible i, i have in my career a number of colleagues. fortunately, never any of the cases that i handled a number of my colleagues head sources that they were handling who were killed because of roughly equivalent breaches of our security and previous decades. any. do you see it as being as serious as that as well? i think it is, i mean there are a number of different trans i would like to draw out of this conversation because

of all the fact that the u. s. secret services of any description apparently can't keep the secret secret. we have a vote 7 that came out of it. we can leaks, we had the shattered broker trying to sell, and i said, fiber weapons online about 7 years ago. so this is one of it, just another league which i think it's interesting because even going back to this certainty and 2013 which is a decade ago now that was taken as read that they were authentic. whereas now what we're looking at all leaks which are being questioned an authentication by the us administration saying why they must be tempered ways that you know, it's not what we're saying in public. or there might be sort of hacking or deep faith or something like that. so it muddy the waters in terms of people's perceptions of where this information might come from, how it might have been held, and the impact it's going to have. so i think they're all sorts of different issues in play here. it's not just about the old spies,

not be able to keep the spyware secret. there's also the whole media manipulation going on here to which are fascinating. and i asked you about the frightening we will delve into some of those to throughout the program colon. do you think that this is a us leak or russian hack or a misinformation campaign? well, i think the old saying perception is reality is, is very important. and my role, the key thing here is it doesn't matter whether this information is genuine or not, it's impact it has on sources accurate sources or the like love of intelligence. and if you consider yourself as a soldier and you're creating an army and i on the front line, if he believes that information he and his colleagues may have shared with the americans stipend, compromised, that has a major impact on the level of trust that they have to merge and of course that can

affect the flow of information. and i think there's a really serious psychological problem here with this. whether that information is genuine or not. what you mean by a psychological problem. can you expand on that? explain that a little bit for us. so when filters are and combo, they rely heavily on each other and they rely also on the information of their been given and the support they're given to protect us from harm, which they believe that support system has been compromised. and that some one or group of people inside are feeling to protect and by leaking information on their for endangering them. that has an impact on the way they see one of the major allies and this case, united states of america on terms of morale. i can see that was a major problem, clint, if we could just go back to where you think this lake might have come from,

i mean, the number of these documents are labeled top secret, so presumably someone with, you know, very high clearance. how many people would have had access to these types of documents? well, unfortunately in a couple of ways, i think i have some insights on that and is not encouraging news from, from my perspective or, or encouraging perspective. yes, top secret is one of the higher levels of classification, although there are many which will sound strange. but there are many classifications exponentially more sensitive than top secret. top secret, there are hundreds of thousands of documents shared with dozens of thousands of individuals in the united states. national security cells that are, there are classified top secret. so that's part of the problem. since 911 attacks 2122 years ago, now the intelligence community has ballooned. and in

a particular way it hired many independent contractors. i was a staff officer, i went through a years of training prior to being commissioned essentially as an officer and then allowed to field except to serve in the field other than under the supervision of a training officer with the independent contractors that isn't really the case they may hire a retired officer like me and bring him or her back, or they'll hire someone who has linguistic abilities or forensic abilities and so on and so forth. but frankly, although it stated that the standards and the requirements, obligations and controls are the same for them. that is not really true. it's impossible to have the same level of security and devotion to mission when you have dozens of thousands of contractors with access to this kind of information. that's what snowden was. that's what a couple of the other cases in the last 20 years of reaches have been,

and i suspect that that is what is happening now. i have no of obviously, firsthand indications, but i recognize the information how it's presented, the kinds of documents that we are seeing and how the system functions. and that's where i suspect will have happened, and they are also easier those individuals for foreign intelligence services, specifically the russians to target and manipulate any i see you nodding along the, through the claim was saying, i mean, if it is someone from inside the, you intelligence agencies, or, or a contractor associated with them. why do you think someone in that position would maybe want to leaked documents like this? because they seemed damaging to so many different countries, including russia, as well as the us, obviously. and also israel in south korea, in your introduction and various other countries. i think what we need to look at

is the geo political tectonic plates here, you know, who is really fighting whom. and there have been a number of proxy was mentioned be in a post 911 issues and the beginning of the war in terra, and the moral flight. the western intelligence agencies went helter skelter, down the route of torture and extraordinary edition kidnapping effectively. and all that sort of thing. and that did, and to stabilize, i think a lot of people's trust, even on the inside, in how our intelligence agencies supposed to function. that has to be proportionality in any democracy when it comes to all trust in these sort of organizations. and when it's a pendulum, things to call one way people waking to distrust. and i think that's what happened in the northeast and the beginning of the 10th. and that's why snowden at all, and he came out who said what he said, that's why other things will lead to think that he leeks or would lead to long to,

to talk with the shadow brokers case. and i think that might be something similar here. so one, there is a generational issue i would suggest, which is perhaps even going back to minded my generation, you know, growing up in the eighty's starting to work in the ninety's. the idea that you would have a job for life. and he would work for an organization, progressed through it and be protected by it compared to what younger people now face when they're coming up. and they might just be seen as contracts is expendable the practical, vetted as carefully whatever breakdown of mutual trust in terms of what the agencies are working for can do, and what the agencies can protect them with that by so i think there's also a hair. it's, it's not just the interpersonal, it's not just the, the way that we perceive mainstream leader or we perceive whistle blowing. we've

seen leak. it's just a breakdown of trust, i think, which is where you stand. and the key question really is, how can we rebuild this to terror societies? again, you know, to build that trust again. any, it was talking there, i guess about trust between the publican and these intelligence agencies colon. what about the trust between the media and the media colon. what about the trust between countries? you know, obviously ukraine resilience has come out and, and condemned these lakes and saying it's just part of a misinformation campaign. i mean, what about the trust between the u. s. and ukraine at this point in time, what does it does? what does it do to that relationship? i think this is a major problem because a conflict. ukraine is not just a war of canning terms rates as a war by the mind, despite the minds of people thrive the world and how they perceive us contact us at

the moment. the fact that you and i and this other media are talking and writing about the story, shows it as is all credit significance. the only people at the moment you must be feeling relatively happy about this property or friends. and so it intelligence because this is almost the perfect deception, all operation. what we have now, god is like a trust subsidy, right? people's lives well being are on the line, but they shouldn't do feel the people around them, particularly their superiors, are somehow incompetent or not caring about the well being them as a major source for discontent and all sorts of difficult things. spring from clean. i want to talk a little bit about the timing. sorry. i just want to say jump in. any thing. it's all about the it's not just the lack of trust. it's all about disillusionment and

perceiving the people circle periods or whatever. empower who don't actually really care about interests of most people. they're more interested in so further. now i'm not saying that is a generalization, but i think that is a perception that most people are beginning to see. and that's why we're seeing an increase in populus movements in disenfranchisement. and the rise that are happening have been happening for years across europe. and that's, that's just the west perspective, let alone you know what's going on in the rest of the world. so i think we need to take that bigger picture as well, and how people begin to feel manipulations and begin fill electra and that spills into digital lives online and how we can protect those 2. and which case back in we just are getting close to call it here, which i totally agree with it. glenn, from an american point of view, i mean obviously misinformation and disinformation and fake news has been widely

discussed over the last 5 or 6 years in the us. how is this leak being viewed there and has that affected trust between the publican and us intelligence agencies in the media that are, that are trying to provide correct and factual information? yes, on this point, which is a very important one. i think i differ a bit from our colleagues. i'm not surprised. i think that there have been statements issue trying to cast doubt on, on the legitimacy of the documents. because when something bad is happening, all one can do really is to wave a shiny object someplace else or spread, smoke, or fog, to try to muddy the perceptions and in some vain hope that the information might not then be taken as accurate or acted upon as immediately,

so that doesn't disturb me, although the implications potentially on the public's perceptions as our colleagues have said are, are great for potentially certainly great what this does to the perceptions of the us. i don't think that that's too much of an issue. the really, the issue is a loss perhaps in face is too strong, a word maybe, but entrust about the competence of the american services and the government. really, it's in my life time. sadly, that the perception of the government by americans has gone from an assumption that it would do right and was serving our interest to one of wariness and cynicism. the reasons that go far beyond the intelligence world, but they affect the intelligence world. so that's, that's really what would happen from the perspective of perception in the americans

. i don't see that as a huge issue. the issue is a more practical one that i see which is that this is a, an unfolding disaster for american intelligence and potentially policy as, as these flaps are. i think to, to give some perspective on how serious the cia and in my colleagues and other intelligence agencies that take this, the single most important element of our training. and is it literally my training last years or for as a lot to go into the field is to protect your asset? it's a cold but a term, but whether it's are the technical source, but always in my specialization, human sources. that's what you have to devote your life to protecting. because if they lose their trust in you, then they will not work with you. and if you make a mistake, they will die. it's taken extremely seriously in the slightest error.

100-110-0000, less serious than this breach will destroy the career of myself for my colleagues. because that is the price. it's just like being a captain with ship, doesn't matter if you are not. the agent of going against the rocks, you are responsible, and so your career will be destroyed. it is the ultimate responsibility. so, so this is a serious issue and that kind of devotion to mission. almost obsessive focus on responsibility, frankly, is not shared, inculcated and can't really exist with people who come for a couple of years to get a credential or to think they're doing something exciting. as opposed to the nearly convent like devotion monk like devotion of traditional intelligence

officer. and i know that i know that is the case in my british collies. i've worked with them and in my french and every other service it's, it's essential. and it's a problem when it doesn't exist. colon, i know you spent your career working with british army intelligence as a psychological wolfish specialist. and as glen mentioned, at the beginning of this program about people's lives and now at risk because of this lake with sources potentially within russia that had been leaking potentially to the us intelligence agencies and, and the c i that they are now at risk. what will russia be doing at this point in time? what will the kremlin be doing at this point in time to try and stem down on those legs? stemmed down on those people that might have been leaking to the us will the allies? well, i think the last speaker sounded out beautifully, you know, or the source is the man or weapon that until agencies, howard to buy reliable,

consistent information that we have regular access to higher. once anything happens that changes that relationship or the perceptions our relationship damage is the flow of information. and since i was northern and northern ireland, the world order has almost changed. we have seen the rise of china. the movement of russia near alliance is being formed. and we're also on the world that communicates much faster. and i think in days gone by were a lot of the contact was done face to face. people now is to some extent diminishing as the volume increases, we can handle fast quantities of information i compared was days gone by, but of the end of the day, intelligence i believe is the relationship between an individual and the his or her handler. and once we lose sight of that, i think then lots of these problems who were talking about that begin to creep down

because we've, we've lost her sense of out of, i got that was by just not the one of the james bond. his of a sometimes very frightened people who are under pressure also and they have to trust you that trusting you was their life. and once we sadly seem to regard is no longer important. i think we have a major problem on our hatch. any, i just want to talk a little bit about criticism of, of the russian intelligence services. a mini military analyst have said that and the russian military apparatus is so deeply compromised, that the document suggested us intelligence has been able to obtain daily real time warnings on the timing of moscow strikes and even some of this specific targets. i mean, what do you make of, of russian intelligence at this point in time and i get from the beginning of the war till now. well, i will answer this, but i do want to pick up all mcmullin j fed because absolutely agree. this is

something i've been talking about is that the human intelligence where you have people that you can task and who report back can you build that relationship of trust is the crown jewel of intelligence work. and you cannot put them at risk that would just be bad on every level as a human being. so yeah, i think this is something that does need to be nurtured and i think it's something that we can leeks and other whistles. websites have tried to protect despite the distance or that come out about this website in terms of oper, skating, the identity of these people. in terms the russians that has been, i would say, or suggest resurgence for at least 15 years about from the you know, the new versions f, s b s, b all blah blah blah from the k g b. and they seem to be, i treat a slightly less good at of with getting their tracks and cutting the tracks because

they've been caught out a number of times number cases. but they all seem to be just the fruitless. that's not to say that the western agencies and noticed research when do not build a penalty, tick surveillance infrastructure, which is what it was known again, disclosed to decade ago. things with prism and around 5 eyes network, which is, you know, yeah, well, the whole north america and easy lynch australia and so every country spies on every country they do what they think is their best in their best interest. some of it and guided some of it is intrusive. some of it is actually pulling ethically, which is what we saw in the immediate aftermath of $911.00 in the war and terrorist committee to the west. so we just need to keep the perspective open. every country has its own national interest. every country has these teens of organizations that 20 these things to protect national interest. we might not agree with it. they would agree with what we're trying to do. but we shouldn't stigmatize whole

populations because of what the government's secret intelligence agencies do. fail the innocent and they're the ones that are victimized. and they're the ones. if they are very unfortunate, they get caught in the crossfire between sticky east and west, like ukraine, like syria, like libya, lack of kind of stone like rock and like many countries across africa being as strict. so we need to think about the big picture plows. it's not just spy versus why this has real genuine impact on millions of people and on all our data globally . and that's the sort of perspective we should try to remember when thinking about the more, the smaller issues that we're talking much say, you know, just very quickly before we, before we go glean what's going to be the long term fall out of this leak in particular you know, the people, the sources that any been talking about i'm glad you asked

a question because it's an important one. and in a perverse way, it's sort of the, it's not a silver lining, but it's a relative eyes in perspective to have before i just, i just very, very quickly to touch on that. what does this imply about the russian services, you know, the worst, the society, the worst, the system, the worst, the government, the more opportunities there are for other intelligence services. so there's no surprise and this is nothing new that one can penetrate to the russians. if one can gain access to them to tell terry system makes it harder. you know, it's, it's a rotten system where there's a lot of corruption. and for all of the flaps and problems that the cia has created in the media, you know, over the years the cia is very, very good and use intelligence community as are other countries to kind of doing its job, which almost one never sees. so that's no surprise, what is the loan him full out of the lake in particular, relatively flaps occur,

unfortunately, relatively regularly with all services. so this will blow over the south. koreans will make a lot of noise because it's embarrassing and allies buying them. but then national interest is our colleagues pointed out will, will dominate, and things will return to people spying and working with each other simultaneously . okay, we'll have to leave it there. thank you so much as tool of i guess, glen cal and the machine and i colin wallace. thank you very much for being on inside story and thank you to for watching, you can see the program again any time by visiting our website, al jazeera dot com, and the further discussion go to our facebook page. that's facebook dot com, forward slash ha inside story. you can also join the conversation on twitter. handle is at ha, inside story from may till macwrite, and the whole team here, bye for now. mm.

ah. as the war, ukraine ranges on, some young rushes, refusing to take up arms. 11 east meets those free to neighboring kazakhstan on a jesse ah, man, man, man tre admit, said carry a 1000 asked icon,

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